This year’s judges were Hermione Giffard (last year’s winner); Alison Turton, Vice President of the BAC; and John Chambers, CEO of the Archives & Records Association UK & Ireland. Programmed Inequality was praised as a strongly argued book that looked at how, after the war, the British computer industry failed to make use of a key asset - the highly skilled women of Bletchley Park. It was described as “an excellent historiographical lesson in how to fruitfully uncover apparently missing stories in history”.

Three other books were commended: Peter Scott, The Market Makers: Creating Mass Markets for Consumer Durables in Inter-war Britain; Regina LeeBlaszczyk, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market  and Leslie Tomory, The History of the London Water Industry, 1580-1820.